Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. Joshua Foer
About This Quote

Jeremy Taylor said: "Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it." He was talking about how boredom can destroy our lives. When we are bored all the time, we tend to do things that are less productive. Let's say you are bored at work, but you will do anything to not be bored at work again. You start to act like your work is less important than other stuff on your mind.

It's called working on autopilot. It's not just on the job though, boredom can really ruin your life if you keep doing things that aren't productive. The one bright side of boredom is that new experiences bring on new memories which help you feel like you have more time in your life.

Source: Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art And Science Of Remembering Everything

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More Quotes By Joshua Foer
  1. Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next...
  2. I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?
  3. Learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.
  4. Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next–and...
  5. If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of...
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